Mobile Voter, the newly formed non-profit dedicated to providing voter registration information via mobile technology, launched their first campaign SFvote yesterday. In collaboration with the Chinese American Voter Education Committee (CAVEC) SFvote hopes to register voters using a text-messaging service developed by Mobile Voter founders Ben Rigby and Bart Cheever

SFvote is Mobile Voters first attempt at answering this need for ease when it comes to voter registration and information.. It is also the first entirely text based voter registration campaign in the United States. By simply texting the word "ivote" to the number 80837, San Francisco mobile phone users can request registration forms and other voter information. For example, after sending the text message to the short code the cell phone user will receive a text-message reply from Mobile Voter providing the user with relevant options. One of these options requests additional information via text-message for the purposes of sending out a pre-filled out registration form to the users home.

You can also elect to receive text-message alerts and reminders to vote in upcoming elections.

Mobile Voter also takes advantage of the social spaces of everyday life to mobilize and motivate voter registration and awareness by launching a massive campaign utilizing billboards, taxi-cab top and magazine ads. "Voter Guides" will also be hitting the hilly streets of San Francisco, who will be on hand to tell people about the new service and help less tech-savy individuals go about using it. And for those who need even more incentives to participate in the democratic process, Mobile Voter is working with local-establishments to offer free-merchandise or discounts when people use the service at their location. This makes a lot of sense since these are the same social spaces in which people are most likely to be interactive with their cell-phone. And with each ad or location requiring a different keyword, campaigns can also easily track localized campaign trends to see which type of location or ad produces the best results.

With these marketing techniques, combined with the "here-and-now" instantaneousness of text messaging, Mobile Voter hopes to use these public spaces to make voting an voting registration and easier process for the masses, especially with the highly mobile and scattered youth population.

"Voter registration is the largest barrier to actual voting," Rigby says, "This is especially the case among youth who also happen to be the largest users of text-messaging in the United States." This is true. The U.S Census Bureau reported that citizens between the age of 18-24 had the lowest voter registration and voting rate of all the age groups during the 2004 elections. And according to a June BigResearch study, 58 percent of 18 to 24 year olds surveyed use text messaging regularly or occasionally, compared with 46 percent of 25 to 34 year-olds, almost 28 percent of 35 to 54 year olds and just 8 percent of those 55 and older. "There is a real potential to mobilize young voters using text-messaging," Rigby concludes. Citing the Harvard University Institute of Politics the Mobile Voter website points out that "Nearly one-third of college students say that they do not know how to request an absentee ballot - 92% say that they would vote 'if the process of registering and voting by absentee ballot were made easier.'"

Mobile Voter is a non-profit non-partisan organization.

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